Scarlett Johansson is terrific in this grubbily engrossing crime thriller
Scarlett Johansson has a moving storyline as Miles Teller’s wife in Paper Tiger.
Adam Driver and Miles Teller belong to a valuable species of movie star that Hollywood largely stopped cultivating around the turn of the century: leading men by presence, character actors by face.
Both their magnetism and their creases and crags are put to excellent use in this grubbily engrossing New York-set crime thriller from James Gray.
They play Irwin and Gary Pearl, two brothers who make the ill-advised decision to go into business with the Russian mob.
It’s 1986, and the gangsters are putting down roots in the grotty waterfront neighbourhood of Brighton Beach.
Driver’s Gary, a gregarious ex-police detective and thriving private security specialist, offers them his services in exchange for a tidy sum.
Gary is sufficiently streetwise to know that he is dealing with some very bad guys.
But the same can’t be said of his civilian brother Irwin (Teller), father of two teenage boys and loving husband of Hester (Scarlett Johansson), who comes to assist with the initial survey – and then makes the disastrous call to return the following evening with his sons (Roman Engel and Gavin Goudey) in order to poke around some more.
This innocent trio end up witnessing something they shouldn’t have, which instantly turns them (in the eyes of the gangsters, at least) into a loose end in urgent need of tying up.
Two brothers, one a cop, tangling with organised crime in 1980s New York?
The Ad Astra director has been here before, in 2007’s wildly under-appreciated We Own The Night, and Paper Tiger is his most straightforwardly pleasurable film since.
Its murky, coarse-grained texture often calls to mind William Friedkin’s The French Connection, which is presumably no accident.
The speckled photography by Joaquín Baca-Asay portrays the city as a shivery, soot-streaked labyrinth (the period detail, as usual with Gray, is so believable it’s almost invisible).
Teller’s tremendous performance as Irwin is so redolent of a great Gene Hackman role – you can feel the weight of his prior decisions and the shame of having jeopardised the safety of his sons pressing down on his shoulders – that if you squint a little the Whiplash star could almost be him. (The glasses also help.)
Driver is similarly well cast as a perennial chancer who can actually walk the walk when tested: be that in a nerve-fraying sit-down with a criminal kingpin, or in a shoot-out in a cornfield – a set-piece Gray stages with a superb command of rhythmic tension and spatial suspense.
Gray’s screenplay contrives a moving sub-plot for Johansson’s Hester, that sits at a charged tangent to Gary and Irwin’s increasingly frantic attempts to either appease or deter the mobsters.
And her scene with Teller and the boys that follows a stomach-knotting home invasion sequence is terrific: her comprehension first of the danger her sons are in and then who’s to blame for it advances so naturally that your heart sinks in tandem with hers.
Gray’s film is itself no paper tiger – yes, it’s a fondly conceived throwback, but its claws are real.
Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. A NZ release date is TBC
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